The old and the new have been incorporated in an aesthetically pleasing manner where portions of the old building façade (left) make up new walls in the renovated space.

Along with a restored and expanded building, the DIA re-opens with a new, “visitor-focused” interpretive philosophy. Those old, erudite descriptions with fancy words–baroque, mimesis, fauvism, and zeitgeist among them–have gone the way of the dinosaur. That’s right, they’ve been exterminated by a massive comet that crashed into the Earth’s surface, causing a radical change in the Earth’s atmosphere and killing off all life forms unable to live under ground or in the water.
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New reception desk with new gift shop in the background.

The old DIA paper membership cards have been replaced with scannable plastic cards with the barcode on one side and a classic work of art on the other. I would be curious to see how many new memberships the grand three week preview process will inspire. It is fairly difficult to see and appreciate all the artwork currently on display, where prior to the expansion, one could feel fairly satisfied of viewing everything in one trip. So, I became a statistic and purchased my own membership.

Designing exhibit halls ain’t easy. You have to take into account the type of art being show, the time period of its creation, a theme the curatorial staff is trying to convey to the visitor, and the tones of the artwork.

That said, your DIA has done an terrific job of creating spaces for the art. Galleries incorporate historical interior design features that take you to the time and place of the art’s creation. Take, for example, the entrance to the Italian Art gallery on the second floor/Farnsworth Street side. The Corinthian capitals and Ogee-arched entrance way takes you into the seventeenth-century Italy portrayed in the paintings.

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Today, visitors have a choice in beginning their DIA experience. Visitors entering from the original Woodward entrance are led up the steps by red carpet and greeted by the timeless grandeur of the Great Hall. In addition, visitors are stunned by the thousands of tiny sparkling mirrors hanging from the ceiling. Visitors entering through the new entrance on Farnsworth will experience a modern reception. The gift shop has been relocated to this new part of the building. It has been expanded to boast a greater selection of items, including unique holiday cards. For those of you starting holiday shopping, the shop remains open to the general public and museum goers alike. The old and the new have been incorporated in an aesthetically pleasing manner where portions of the old building façade make up new walls in the renovated space.

Tuesday morning the Detroit Yacht Club hosted another successful Model D Speaker Series session. This event one focused on growing retail in the city. The panel included successful recent and veteran entrepreneurs. The overarching message: the opportunities to meet basic needs exist within the city, where it does not in the suburbs. Brand loyalty must be created by small entrepreneurs before outside investors and big box retailers discover the potential of the city. Detroit residents are starved of essential food and clothing retail. Demand outweighs current capacity, which causes more than a billion dollars to be dropped outside the city.

After a six-year and $158-million-dollar renovation, the Detroit Institute of Arts will re-open its doors to the general public this Friday, November 23. ADMISSION IS FREE and the museum will be open for 32 consecutive hours of special events, music, and open galleries.

The DIA has been re-thought, re-structured, re-vitalized, and is ready to be revealed.

Metroblogging Detroit got a sneak peak at the new museum and will be posting about it every day up until the Grand Opening on Friday. We’ll help you to get an idea what to expect out of the new DIA. Most importantly, we hope you will join in the discussion about the museum–what it means to the city, the community, and to you.

Feel free to comment and tell us what you like or dislike about the museum. What left you amazed? What left a little something to be desired? In its new form, does DIA stand for the Detroit Institute of Awful or the Detroit Institute of Awesome?

The picture above is an original piece of art made by me, on leather skin, at the museum’s Family Room on the second floor. Examine it closely. You can tell by the Realist mode in which I attempted to capture the Penobscot Building and One Detroit Center, by the Post-Impressionalist perspective with which I captured antelope being hunted by boatsmen, and by the play of color on a dark canvas, that I am a sucky artist.